Jeff B wrote:I'm not sure I follow that one. Or, rather, I don't think of meals as an order in which this food should be ate first or be mixed with this food. Basically, if I'm enjoying a Meat Loaf with Mashed Potatoes (my famous example for most everything), it's not important to me to make sure that I eat the potatoes first or that I mix them with the meat loaf. In fact, for me, it detracts. I'm just looking to enjoy each for what they are.
As another analogy, I might like song A, song B and song C but I wouldn't play them on top of one another at the same time
To see my point of you you need not to relate each item on the plate to a song, but see the whole plate itself as a song. What you do, from my point of view, would be equivalent to dismantling the song so that you only hear one instrument at a time instead of the layered effect from multiple tracks in the way that most music is recorded these days. By the same token, the food I put on a plate is an ensemble, each thing meant to complement the others in a harmonious whole.
I could kind of see your point though, if every meal one sits down to is a typical midwestern meat-and-potatoes three-plop presentation, whereby a meat is accompanied by an unrelated starch and a vegetable, say pork chop with rice and carrots, chosen merely because yesterday we had steak, potatoes and green beans. Those are not ensembles, and the pieces are basically independent so you might as well eat each one singly as compared to going back and forth and occasionaly combining the foods on your fork in order to enjoy both the soloists and the symphony.
Talk about quirks, though: you're nothing compared to an old friend of mine who used to take one or two bites of each item and then run to the kitchen (yes, even at someone else's house) to partially reload her plate. She had Aspergers Syndrome and required her plate to have some sort of mathematical balance known only to her, but it was like a one-sided chess game: from close to the first bite she'd know exactly how many bites of each item she needed, in what order and which bite was going to be the last bite, and her reloading was for the purpose of ensuring the perfect final outcome. It drove me nuts until I realized what drove her, and that she really couldn't help it.
By comparison, other than my issue with cold creamy white food I really don't have much in the way of food quirks. And btw, I share your dislike of straws. Reminds me of a painful episode in early life, and I just won't use them.